[shade]

I would say it's cool in the sense that building anything is cool, but I find myself mostly in agreement with your take, although with a caveat.

I can't find the quote now, but someone (I think simonw?) said that they feel a bit of an obligation to spend at least as much time working on writing something as it would take to read it, and I agree with that... if you want me to spend time reading your post, I'd like to know you actually made an effort on it.

For me, writing is thinking, and helps me refine my thinking, so I don't use AI to assist writing process. I agree with the comments that AI writing tends to have a specific voice, and I don't care for that voice and don't want my writing to come across that way.

Where I do find it useful in writing, however, is as an editing pass in an advisory role. I don't ask it to rewrite anything for me, but I will ask it to double-check for excessive passive voice, tone, does it raise unanswered points, etc. I typically write my draft posts in Zed, and use Zed's AI chat panel to throw a request at Claude. The big thing though is not blindly accepting every suggestion the AI makes - I read them, think about it, and sometimes adjust the post based on that feedback. It's a useful sanity checking step and while a real human editor would be preferable, I can't justify the cost to hire an editor for my little blog that probably gets zero hits most days. :)

[haswell]

I’m on board with your caveat. I have no issues with using AI to analyze the writing to identify potential issues. I currently use spell/grammar checking and I have no qualms about that. A more robust proofreader does seem useful.

To your point, I’d want to constrain such a review to identifying structural or consistency issues vs. the AI getting involved with the subject matter itself.

The issue I ran into the few times I wrote something and asked ChatGPT to read it and identify any issues was that it was all too eager to tell me how to massively restructure things. The result read like typical AI slop. This was a prompting issue on my part because I gave it instructions that were too open ended. Careful/restrictive prompting is definitely necessary to make this viable.